Customers for the company, Internet Consulting Services, disappeared in the infamous tech bust, when many online companies failed after years of unsustainable growth.

Then Syracuse University came calling. Its athletics department needed someone to take over its website - and fast, because its current operator was going out of business, another victim of the tech bust. Would Rubin step in?

Rubin, an alumnus, not only jumped at the opportunity, he hit on an idea that would save his company.

Instead of designing websites for any old company, he would create them for college athletics programs and cut multi-year deals to run them.

Eighteen years later, his company, now named Sidearm Sports, is the premier platform for college sports websites across the nation. It runs the websites of 1,100 colleges and universities, including 280 of the 320 schools in Division 1 sports.

Sidearm employs 127 people, including 67 full-time, a number Rubin expects to rise over the next couple of years as the company expands into other markets.

In December, Sidearm will graduate from office space it's been renting since 2008 in Hinds Hall, home of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. Its new home will be the newly renovated State Tower Building in downtown Syracuse, where, at 15,000 square feet, it will be the historic building's largest tenant.

Jeffrey Rubin, founder, president and CEO of Sidearm Sports, stands in his office full of Syracuse University sports memorabilia. (Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com)Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com

"It's a little bittersweet," Rubin, 45, said of the move. "Syracuse University has been Sidearm's home for 18 years and has been such a great partner of ours."

Rubin, who grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts, came to SU's iSchool as a student in 1991 and never left.

After graduating in 1995 with a degree in information management and technology, he formed Internet Consulting Services, or ICS. While working toward his master's in telecommunications and network management at the school, he began designing websites for companies.

It was a time of rapid growth in internet usage and, for a while, business was good for Rubin. His largest customers included the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and Sony Music.

The dot-com crash nearly wiped it out for him. But ICS was known around campus because it had done work for the university's business, engineering and information technology schools. So, when Total Sports notified the university's athletics department that it would be dropping out of the website business in 48 hours and would no longer be able to run the university's sports website, the university turned in desperation to Rubin.

He jumped at the chance, taking over www.suathletics.com (now named cuse.com). The university was thrilled with the results.

"He had a staff person who wrote the content management software from the eyes of a sports public relations professional, in terms of the language and everything to run it," said Sue Edson, the university's executive senior associate athletics director for communications. "He made everything very intuitive for us, so we didn't have to stop and put our technology hat on and figure things out."

Rubin quickly expanded his work for the SU athletics office to other colleges and universities. Instead of being one-off deals, he persuaded them to sign multi-year contracts to have his company run their websites.

"It was a lot steadier work," Rubin said. "I could actually forecast out. I'd know what my revenues were going to be next year."

Rubin initially kept his company's old name for what was essentially a new company, but he changed it in 2006 to Sidearm Sports. Besides being much less boring than the old name, Sidearm is short for "sports information distribution engine, archive and records management."

The websites provide fans of the schools with team rosters, schedules, stats, videos and other content. The schools provide the content, while Sidearm provides the software that drives the sites.

In addition, Sidearm enables the schools to live-stream their games over the web. This year, it will live stream 40,000 college sporting events. The technology behind its video platform is provided by CBS Sports Digital under an agreement that allows CBS to sell unused advertising space on the websites run by Sidearm.

Sidearm operates out of a crowded 3,200-square-foot office on the third floor of Hinds Hall as part of the university's Case Center, a business incubator. (It previously leased space in the university's life sciences building.)

The company's relationship with the university has been mutually beneficial. In addition to its 67 full-time employees, Sidearm employs 60 SU students part time, many of them from the iSchool.

Sidearm Sports will maintain a small office in Hinds Hall at Syracuse University, above, after moving its headquarters to the State Tower Building in downtown Syracuse in December. (Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com)Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com

SU iSchool Dean Elizabeth Liddy said the school always brings prospective students to Sidearm's offices during campus visits to show them the job opportunities available to them, both during their college careers and after graduation.

She said Rubin's ability to capitalize on a strong niche market (college athletics) and the company's reputation for designing reliable platforms have been keys to its success.

"They do very, very good work," she said. "You don't want your website going down before a game."

Sidearm makes money two ways. It charges licensing fees for the use of its website platforms and sells advertising on many of the websites, which it splits with the schools.

Sidearm generates more than $10 million a year in revenue, triple what it did four years ago, Rubin said. He declined to disclose profits.

Rubin sold Sidearm to Learfield Sports, a Texas-based manager of multimedia rights for colleges around the country, in 2014, but he remains its president and CEO and has kept its operations entirely in Syracuse. He declined to say how much Learfield paid for his company.

The acquisition by Learfield gave Sidearm access to schools in the "Power Five" college athletic conferences - the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Big 12 Conference, the Pac-12 Conference and the Southeastern Conference. Learfield is the multimedia rights holder for many of the schools in those big conferences.

"While they could not -- nor would we want them to -- force anyone to use Sidearm, they were able to open the doors for meetings," Rubin said. "Once we were able to have a seat at the table and showcase our platform, we were fortunate to win their business."

Sidearm had a little more than 700 college and university athletic departments as clients in 2014. Since then, its client list has been growing at a rate of about 100 schools a year. They include many of the biggest in college sports - among them, the University of Notre Dame, Penn State, University of Kansas, the University of Alabama and the University of Texas.

The bigger clients that Learfield gave Sidearm access to have helped to drive Sidearm's growth.

"I think I could write a book on a picture-perfect acquisition," Rubin said. "Everything that I was hoping would happen has happened and even greater. But yet, they still let me run Sidearm. They've never put anybody in here that's looking over my shoulder."

"As long as we hit our numbers every year, our revenue goals, they're going to let us do our thing, but yet they give us this invaluable strategic resource," he said. "They opened the door to this Power Five community."

Employment at the company is growing rapidly, too. Sidearm had 22 full-time employees in 2014 and has 67 now. Rubin said he expects the number of full-time employees to grow to between 85 and 90 over the next couple of years as Sidearm expands beyond college and university sports.

Rubin said the company plans to offer its services to entertainment venues, such as performing arts centers. And it will offer new products, such as mobile apps that fans can use to buy merchandise and tickets (Learfield acquired the Paciolan ticketing service from Comcast Spectacor in 2017), and order refreshments at games, he said.

"We have a capacity to change fans' behavior, to help drive ticket sales," he said. "We drive donations. We drive merchandise. The point is to get schools, to get athletic directors, to stop thinking about their website as a content distribution engine but begin to think of it as a monetization engine."

Rubin often taps SU -- and the iSchool in particular -- for the talent his company needs, but he also recruits nationally. And that's one of the reasons he decided to move his company downtown (in addition to needing more space).

After decades of decline, downtown Syracuse is undergoing a revival with new restaurants and bars opening and the upper floors of many underused or vacant commercial buildings being converted into upscale apartments.

"Look at the downtown scene -- the restaurants, the bars, the night life," said Rubin. "The professional networking opportunities downtown provides for employees is huge."

Sidearm Sports will become the largest tenant in the State Tower Building in Syracuse when it moves its headquarters into the building in December. (Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com)Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com

He said he did not even consider moving the company to a bigger city.

"I think you have a market that's primed for small companies to be in downtown Syracuse and grow," he said. "In New York or Dallas, I'd be a small company that nobody would care about. Unless you're the next Facebook, nobody wants to help you."

Rubin is not completely leaving the university. He's keeping a small office in Hinds Hall for the SU students who work for him part time, and he'll continue to teach an information technologies class at the iSchool.

In addition to teaching 200 students a semester, he has helped shape the web design curriculum at the school, sits on the school's Board of Advisors as well as the university's Falk Sport Management program and Athletics Director John Wildhack's external affairs committee, and is active with the Jim & Juli Boeheim Foundation.

But Sidearm's full-time staff will move in mid-December to the State Tower Building, taking up the majority of its fifth and sixth floors. Its new headquarters will feature an open-office design, with small and large conference rooms.

It won't have a giant dragon with a tail that doubles as a slide, like another growing Syracuse tech company, TCGplayer, will have at its new offices in the Galleries of Syracuse a few blocks away. But Sidearm's new office will have sofas and lounge chairs, a lunch area and amenities such as a game room where employees can play ping-pong and video games during their breaks.

"We need software engineers, designers, project managers," Rubin said. "They can go anywhere in the country. If we're going to recruit the talent here, then we have to find a way to retain that talent and I think moving to the State Tower Building is a big step."